I'm hoping you can find an answer to a puzzle that is troubling us greatly at another forum. If any of you can find an answer, that will help greatly; the creator of the puzzle had to go to the hospital for several days, so he won't be able to tell us the answer for a long while, and we're completely stumped.
Here's the whole puzzle:
:::::::: ?
Yup--that's it. Eight colons and a question mark. Make sense of that if you will.
Just so you know, I don't have any answers for you; we're completely stumped. Has anyone seen this one before, or does anyone know an answer?
Many thanks.
EDIT: Let me add a few solutions we've discarded/we've discussed with the creator of the puzzle ("Pete" at that link) before he left for the hospital. I looked up several different meanings of colon, and Pete let me know that "No, sorry. I can confirm it isn't the word 'colon,'" which tells me that it's not something like colonate or colonnade or something like that, which I suggested, but rather that it's the ":" symbol itself.
SECOND EDIT: Someone at that forum--Tarathian123--sent it to a friend of his who's a mathematician and computer programmer. He was also unable to figure it out.